Attunement of the Gaze (2024)
Participatory action
Attunement of the Gaze is a participatory action that took place in public space before the opening of an exhibition. The work explores how ways
of looking are formed through social situations, shared attention, and interpersonal interaction rather than through images alone. Before entering the exhibition space, participants were invited to take part in a guided collective action that involved proximity, physical contact between strangers, and moments of directed attention.
The action proposed looking as something that can be consciously shifted and recalibrated. Through simple instructions and shared presence, habitual roles of observer and observed were temporarily suspended.
The gaze was treated not as an individual act, but as a relational process shaped by trust, vulnerability, and social negotiation. The work framed the exhibition visit as something that begins before encountering artworks, placing emphasis on embodied experience, mutual awareness, and the conditions under which viewing takes place.
Cameraman: Anton Serdjukov
Photos: video stills
Common Line (2023)
Installation with a performative component
Common Line is an installation that emerged from a performative action developed during the XXIII Kohila Symposium Clay and Politics. The work addresses the political dimension of artistic labour by shifting attention away from finished objects toward the conditions under which artistic work is produced and valued.
The project grew out of the artist’s dual role as both curator and participant. Artists from nine countries worked with clay as a physically demanding and time-intensive medium. Despite different national and economic contexts, the work focuses on a shared condition: the precarity of artistic labour.
Based on conversations and collected data, the artist calculated the actual cost of each exhibited work, including material expenses, working hours, firing processes, accommodation, travel, education, and unpaid labour. These calculations aimed to make visible forms of work that are usually overlooked or treated as self-evident.
The exhibition opening took the form of a staged performative presentation. Artists stood facing the audience while their works were temporarily concealed by textiles bearing written information about labour and cost. After the performance, these textiles were suspended along a single line between trees, forming the installation Common Line and inviting closer reading and dialogue.
Direction/ perfromer Evi Pärn
Voice Joonas Parve
Assistants: Cristopher Siniväli, Efy Zeniou, Joonas Parve
Artist Performed: Eyvind Solli Andreassen (NO), Dori Schechtel Zanger (IL), Darta Berkmane (LV), Irene Zenonos (CY), Mingaile Mikelenaite (LT), Niko Mankinen and Mira Niittymäki (FI), Rita Badilla-Gudino (PH) and Katarzyna Misciur (PL).
Photos by Annika Haas
Encountering A Light Object (2019)
Kaarel Kurismaa
A Light Object (1975/2017)
Encountering A Light Object (2019)
Finissage performance created in dialogue
with A Light Object (1975/2017)
by Kaarel Kurismaa. Performed at the
exhibition Yellow Light Orchestra, KUMU Art Museum, Tallinn, 17 February 2019.
This video documents a performative
encounter with the artwork in the context
of the exhibition finissage.
Performer Evi Pärn
Camera Kaisa Sammelselg
Photo credits: KUMU ©
It is legitimacy, isn't it?
It is legitimacy, isn't it? ( 2013)
It Is Legitimacy, Isn’t It? is a performance in which I embody a collective figure of top managers working in state-owned companies. The character’s defining feature is an ever-growing appetite — not only for food, but for power, privilege, and public resources.
The performance responds critically to a situation in which the salaries of some state company CEOs exceed those of the country’s president or prime minister, while many of these companies operate at the edge of bankruptcy and remain afloat through continuous state support. This imbalance exposes a system in which responsibility is diluted, while entitlement is normalized.
Eating functions as a central performative action. Through the act of consumption, the body becomes a site of biopolitical control and excess. The growing appetite of the performer operates as a satirical metaphor for institutional greed, illustrating how public resources are absorbed and legitimized through bureaucratic and political mechanisms.
In the performance, I am served by figures representing state authority, who function as intermediaries rather than decision-makers. I demand food and drink associated with everyday people — sprats in oil and beer — turning symbols of modest consumption into tools that sustain an inflated managerial body. The contrast exposes how the language of “the common good” is mobilized to justify unequal distributions of wealth and power.
By exaggerating consumption and embodying institutional excess, the performance critiques the normalization of inequality within state-owned enterprises. It Is Legitimacy, Isn’t It? uses satire and the physicality of eating to question how legitimacy is constructed, performed, and maintained through bodies that are publicly funded yet largely unaccountable.
Direction/ perfromer: Evi Pärn
Direction assistant / Perforer as Toomas: Aleksandr Hobotov
Performer as Hendrik: Mart Vainre
Camera: Eerik Kändler
Music: Wagner - Ride of the Valkyries
Photos Silvia Pärmann ©
Perfromance "Games of life's surrounding"
"Games of life's surrounding" (2012)
Games of Life’s Surroundings is a performance that addresses questions
of identity, belonging, and communication within a multicultural and
multilingual society. The work stems from the artist’s personal position as
a member of a mixed family, navigating multiple cultural references and experiences of in-betweenness.
The performance explores how language, symbols, and bodies mediate communication and misunderstanding. By exposing failures in interpersonal
and intercultural dialogue, the work reflects on the tensions surrounding
youth integration in contemporary Estonia. Rather than approaching the
subject through abstraction, the artist insists on a personal and embodied perspective.
A central action of the performance involves piercing the body with an
Estonian national silver brooch. This gesture brings together vulnerability,
pain, and national symbolism, transforming a traditional cultural object into
a tool for articulating unresolved social tensions. The act foregrounds the
body as a site where political, cultural, and emotional conflicts intersect.
In parallel, the performance employs visual wordplay through the literal exposure of tongues interacting with the brooch. This gesture functions as a metaphor for communication itself — unstable, risky, and prone to misinterpretation. Language and symbols are shown not as neutral carriers of meaning, but as charged elements shaped by history, power, and personal experience.
Games of Life’s Surroundings argues that discussions around integration often rely on superficial labeling and inherited prejudices. While acknowledging ongoing difficulties and mistrust within society, the work also points toward generational change. Younger people, less burdened by historical trauma, may relate differently to questions of identity and belonging. By introducing emotional and bodily experience into this discourse, the performance seeks to complicate simplified narratives and open space for more nuanced understanding.
Video documentation of the performance was presented as part of Made in Estonia Marathon 2012.
Camera (studio): Kristina Õllek
Camera (theatre): Irina Saburova
Editing: Evi Pärn
Video documentation of performance itself here >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
"Games of life's surrounding" (2013)
This video is a staged and filmed version of the performance originally presented at Made in Estonia Marathon 2012. The action was restaged specifically for the purpose of documentation, allowing the performative elements to be translated into a video format.
While originating from a live performance, the video functions as an independent artwork, carrying the same conceptual and political content described above. Rather than serving as a simple record, the filmed version extends the performative logic and offers a focused encounter with the work through the medium of video.
Camera: Kristina Õllek
Editing: Evi Pärn
Pasword to watch the video is > can2
Photo Annika Haas ©
Conductor Is Sculptural Capital (2012)
Performance, duration 10’
Conductor Is Sculptural Capital is a performance that explores the idea of a person as a layered construct of texts. Within this framework, the processes of copying, transmitting, and interpreting information become central. Information accumulates on the body like overlapping layers, producing interference and noise rather than clarity.
The performance reflects on how meaning is shaped, distorted, and reproduced through repeated acts of interpretation. The individual is treated as both a carrier and a receiver of information, situated within systems that continuously overwrite and reframe identity.
The performance was presented at Made in Estonia Marathon 2012 at Kanuti Gildi Saal on 17 March 2012 in Tallinn.
The work was created in collaboration with Taavi Suisalu and Lilli Tölp.
Photo Annika Haas ©
Fa(r)ce (2012)
Fa(r)ce is a mixed-media performance combining live visuals, sound, and improvisation. The work uses a real-time video projection of an improvising face as a form of notation — or more precisely, as a conductor for the musicians. Facial expressions function as cues that guide musical responses, creating a system for generating spontaneous sound through embodied signals.
The performance explores an experimental approach to music-making, where improvisation operates within a set of simple but essential rules. Rather than following traditional notation, the musicians respond directly to visual and performative stimuli, producing music in real time through collective interpretation.
Performed by:
Evi Pärn – face
Lilli Tölp – zither
Ann Kuut – violin
Eerik Kändler – guitar, DIY synthesizer
Fa(r)ce was developed as part of the Graphic Hard Scores workshop
led by Felix Kubin at Sint-Lucas Beeldende Kunst, Ghent, within an experimental studio context. The aim of the workshop was to invent
new methods of musical notation beyond conventional systems.
Original concept by: Evi Pärn, Arjen Verswijvelt, Machteld Rullens,
Thaïs Dupont
DAMA 8 – Workshop Final
Presentation (2012)
Documentation
This video documents the final outcome of the DAMA 8 workshop, presented at Rovaniemi Design Week 2012. The work brings together contributions from participants across multiple institutions and disciplines.
My contribution to the project focused on light-based elements: LED lights embedded in ice spheres and programmed with Arduino to flash in a specific sequence. The combination of light, code, and melting ice introduced a temporal and environmental dimension to the installation, emphasizing ephemerality and transformation.
Credits
Riga Teacher Training and Educational Management Academy:
Ieva Liepa, Stella Upaciere
University of Tartu Viljandi Culture Academy:
Mari Lääne
Estonian Academy of Arts:
Henri Hütt, Lilli Tölp, Liisalotte Elme, Evi Pärn, Taavi Suisalu
University of Lapland:
Juraj Kyppö, Beth Kate Walsh, Roxy Russel, Terhi Silenius,
Virta Niina
Iceland Academy of the Arts:
Myrra Leifsdóttir, Guðrún Heiður Ísaksdóttir
Professors:
Hans-Günter Lock, Raivo Kelomees, Tomi Knuutila
More about DAMA: medialappi.net/dama/
